How I Made An Extra $280.41 In 54 Days In A Brand New Niche & With A Brand New Website

Like the headline says, this post is about how I made an extra $280.41 in 54 days in a brand new niche market… but… there’s a twist here — I built back links to only 2 pages on the entire site.

Quick Update: 10/2: The site is now climbing at a much faster pace and has earned $677.44 and the pace at which is makes money is on a huge uptick.

Sites always make money slower in the very beginning but once they become established and ranking well the money comes in at a much faster pace.

Here’s a screen shot:

I am also going to show you how you can do it too.

Before I dig into this, showing you how I did it and how you can too; I want to go into a couple of details.

In the last couple of months I’ve been slowly piecing together a new training course for people and you can find it here at Niche 60.

However, it’s going to be a great learning center for people who are working on building an online income. It will be doubly awesome for all of my current Niche Blitzkrieg members because it will help supplement their current learning and reinforce ideas taught.

The Idea Behind This Experiment…

Aside from just wanting to make more money I wanted to build a new website to demonstrate how you can do the same thing, using the same techniques I am.

About 5 Weeks ago I was helping one of my family members move some things around and unfortunately I stepped in a hole in the yard and my ankle rolled up on me.

I limped around thinking it would heal up over about a week long period…

…The result?

My first broken bone!

While it seems like a better thing to break than say, my hands, it really hasn’t been a picnic and has caused me several delays in the project. I have to basically keep it elevated 24/7 right now.

I really believe had this not happened a higher amount of income would have followed in this niche much faster. That said, the cash will come in soon enough.

Anyway, I have at least another week off, in a boot, so after that I’ll probably put some hardcore focus into this niche market because I think it has the potential to make $20,000 per month or more if I really work on the traffic.

The truth is, most niche markets can pull money like that if you’re willing to focus on it and commit to it.

Here Are My Results From The Niche So Far

Clicks: 493

Sales: 44

Commissions: $280.41

I have 2 different affiliate programs on this site. The first one is pays around 35% and the second one pays around 6%.

While the first affiliate program had 8 less sales it made substantially more money.

Just, something to keep in mind when you’re choosing an affiliate program.

However, any affiliate program would work.

The price of the products promoted on the site are anywhere between $6-$60, nothing higher.

Here Are My Traffic Stats:

900 clicks on 391 search terms. I do not have 391 posts on this website. In fact, I only currently have 28 posts on the site!

So my posts are ranking for several different keywords.

Up until a week ago I wasn’t even on page 1 for my main keyword phrase. I am not even in the top 6 currently, but, I am working on improving this.

But, I’ll show you in a few moments why it doesn’t even matter or not if I am ranking in the top 10 for my main keywords right now anyway.

So Here’s What I Am Doing

I could have optionally used Market Samurai instead of Keyword Canine.

You can of course do all of this manually, but, this saved me days of research and made it easier to know how strong the keyword phrase I wanted to rank for was.

Since I know the question will come up; if you need to select one tool over the other, right now I’d select Keyword Canine because of the easy to follow color codes. Keyword Snatcher can wait until later if you need to wait on a tool.

I found my main keyword by brainstorming a niche and then doing keyword research to find a keyword I liked.

Do not neglect keyword research, it’s vital to your success.

How Strong Was My Keyword Competition?

Using Keyword Canine I found a keyword that I really liked that had MEDIUM COMPETITION and about 1900 searches per month (this has increased to about 2400 recently).

Here is a shot of how it looked in Keyword Canine.

As you can see in Keyword Canine it tells me how easy the keyword phrase is to rank for by listing it as 45/100. This is in the medium range.

I of course used WordPress as using the techniques taught inside of Niche 60.com.

Making It Pretty

While I could have used a free theme I went with a really nice looking paid theme from Studio Press.

Any of their themes would work and give the site an nice professional feel.

Of course, as I mentioned you could use a free theme if you want to save some money. Just use a nice looking theme that screams professionalism.

Additional Keyword Research

I am building the site around the main keyword phrase. That means all additional post will be built based on the same topic.

So when you do additional keyword research you want to use your main keywords as a base to start from.

Remember earlier when I mentioned that it wasn’t until a week ago that I started ranking in the top 10 for my main keyword phrase?

Well, you’ll remember that I mentioned that it didn’t matter as well.

The reason is because I found a series of keywords that most people in the niche were neglecting — because they simply didn’t know about them!

Using Keyword Snatcher I typed in my keyword phrase and it gave me a list of keywords that were in my niche that were getting searches but no other tool (including Google’s Keyword Planner) was showing me existed.

Again, read my review of Keyword Snatcher here, as this will show you how it works and how to use it for keyword research.

Anyway, using this tool I compiled about 20 additional keywords that I wanted to rank for. Many of these I ranked for without doing a single shred of link building.

I will likely do another round of keyword research soon using Keyword Snatcher and probably pick another 20-30 keywords to rank for.

So use the tool and do the same for yourself.

The Content

The next part I simply needed to write the content or order the content.

I wrote about 40% of the content and the other 60% I ordered. It saved me a ton of time. I ordered it through Iwriter. I spent around $50 on the content.

To save money you can always write the content yourself. Most of my posts are 500-1500 words. The long detailed ones that are 1000 words plus, I wrote, including the homepage.

Optionally, you can order 300 word articles at Iwriter and then add more content to them yourself.

I tried to put out around 1 post every 1-2 days. I was really relaxed with this. You can, of course, move faster or slower than this. What I suggest to NOT do is to put all 20+ posts on your site in 1 day.

Spreading it out will allow you to come up with several days of fresh content.

Also, not every post on the site is promoting something. About 20% of my posts are informative only. These types of posts are simply designed to pull traffic and give my site an authority feel.

As far as promoting products I leave this to my posts themselves and I only have one add in my sidebar widget. I don’t want to scare people off with ads everywhere.

By adding this content over a 40-50 day period I slowly started ranking for the keywords I chose. Within about 10 days of adding content I actually score my first sale. It grew from there.

Getting Top 10 Ranks

As I mentioned earlier, I haven’t done much link building on this site. I built a few links from a press release site, a few articles and blog commenting on about 10 sites early on. This was it until about a month into the project.

I used my 45 day plan to rank in the search engines to get ranked. I have a walk-through there.

However, since I was limited on time I didn’t even do any 2nd tier link building.

Instead I simply ordered the Link Building Package for new sites from Rank Crew.

I didn’t do any guest posting or search for link partners or anything like that. Though I agree with those tactics I simply didn’t have the time I wanted.

When you are time strapped it’s best to pay someone a cheap price to have this done for you. Some link building is better than absolutely no link building at all.

Over time I will add more links and get this site ranking #1 for the main keywords.

From the little bit of link building I had done, I am now ranking in the top 10. Again, not top 5 yet, but I plan to get it there soon.

Eventually, I’ll do more link building for additional posts that I want to boost higher in search.

Bing and Google

I didn’t submit a sitemap to Google until about 3 days ago and I didn’t add my site to Bing until a few days ago as well.

These are things I typically like to do early on. I didn’t get a chance to do this and I believe it will increase my traffic and sales even more in the near future.

In fact, checking Bing I am getting very few clicks from Bing so far. This will explode soon by simply submitting my sitemap to Bing and joining their webmasters tools. I show you how to use Bing here.

Final Thoughts

I am going to keep putting out content each month. I am not sure how much for this niche. It might be 1-2 posts or it might be 10 or more. I haven’t fully decided yet.

As I continue growing in rank, adding new content and working on optimizing the site I fully expect to get this site up to at least $1500 per month. However, I am not limiting it’s growth to that as I mentioned before I believe there is massive potential here.

In fact, I am now on pace for about $1200 in the next 30 days from this site. If I can maintain my search engine rank for my current keywords, this shouldn’t be a problem.

I just wanted to show you guys/gals that even with limited time you can do this stuff!

You just have to do it and stick it out.

It doesn’t happen over night.

Practice will make you better and the repetition will make you great. Master keyword research and it gets even easier.

I am not sure how much time I’ll be putting into this site coming up.

Chances are it’ll be limited due to my injury and the fact that my family is moving in about a month. Our builder is almost done with the construction of our home so I’ve been busy all around!

I also plan on finding a better 2nd affiliate program. I have one in mind right now that pays 15% instead of 6% and I’ll likely work on that soon. This would more than double the sales from the 2nd affiliate program on the site.

I will say, if you’re interested in doing this, then do it! Go after a niche. Strive for something that you want to achieve and go get it done.

Anyone can do this stuff. It just takes dedication and time.

There are millions of niche markets and there is a ton of money out there.

Questions? Thoughts? Have some good results to share too?

If you like this content I’d appreciate it if you’d share it with a friend on Facebook or Google+ as well. It means a lot to me and would make my day.

Michael Brown

I'm Michael S. Brown, Internet Marketer, husband and father. I have been successful in business and marketing since 1998. In 2007 I took to the internet marketing world and have never looked back.
I love teaching people the knowledge that I have acquired and the ultimate boost to my ego is to see everyone I teach succeed in business. My goal is to make everyone who comes into contact with me as successful or even more successful than myself.

Hi Michael,
I’m really enjoying your Niche60 site. Just out of general interest what macro niche did you go into for this experiment. I know it makes no difference and its the keyword research that narrows it down – I’m just generally curious 🙂 Also while most of my posts, on my new site, are really informational (“what is” and “how to” posts)I am tending to add a paragraph at the end of each to the effect “A product I’ve found useful…” and added a buy link at the end of it. It’s not hard sell but this on this site its at the end of each post. Too much?

Thanks Brent 🙂 I’ll be beefing up the content over there this week and next even more.

The niche I went into I don’t want to give out publicly (lesson learned from the past). I like to avoid the added competition. It’s a gadget niche, that includes products that are sold on Amazon as well.

As long as what you’re doing doesn’t feel like a sales pitch I think that might help increase sales. I tend to shy away from doing that, but, that is just personal preference.

Thanks Michael,
I wasn’t trying pirate your niche 😀 I was just curious what very general area you were focusing on.
Thanks for the advice on the sales pitch – I just had one of those moments when I read that not all posts had promotion on it on your experiment. I am going to mix it up a little with my next 10 posts and just have some Smart Links (from the plugin) inside the post i.e. “Click here to find out about…” and analyse my traffic when it starts to build a little more. As always thank you 😀 And hope the boot comes off soon

Yes, because I don’t want any added competition in the niche with thousands of people who know what they are doing and I don’t want my results skewed. i.e. if thousands of people flock to the site it lowers my testing conversion rates.

The only added benefit for my readers would be to see how I have the site setup and the type of content I put up. However, I already teach these things and I have examples already setup to show people how to create a site and how to construct good content (you can find those under the tutorial section at the top of this site).

Also I give the traffic and commission stats above, along with the commission %’s as well.

So while I understand why you and many others would love to see the site I don’t plan on showing this exact site until it’s more established. It’s not that I don’t trust my students and readers, I do, it’s the outside spectators that could sabotage the site with a crappy Fiverr gig.

However, I think I know what you’re talking about. So far that should only affect analytic stats and show up as “not provided”.

i.e. In my analytics I am showing that 1333 of the search terms that have sent traffic to my site are not provided. They seem to be making their data more vague – not sure if it’s for ad-boosting purposes or what they are doing so far.

Just got Mr. Leger’s email with your case study. I too have a new site, which is a little over a month old, but no sales as yet. I know there’s money in the niche because I have another blog in the very same niche that was killed by the various Google animals (I did make money every month, around $200 or so). I’ve also order the RSS and social bookmarking submissions from Rank Crew as well and I also have Keyword Snatcher (will check out your tutorial for using it). In August I got 236 unique visitors and 265 in September.

I have about 14 posts and about 4 long reviews on the site, which I wrote myself (no funds to outsource). I wish I new what I was doing wrong. The keywords are all low to medium competition. Anyway, I’m going to browse around your site to see what I can learn from you. Thanks.

Thanks, my name is linked to the site. I’m still trying to figure out how Facebook works. Anyway, I read one of your other posts and submitted the site to Bing like you suggested. Will definitely check out the other post about conversions.

Hey Michael,
Just revisiting this and thought of a question. You keep adding more keywords – how does that work structure wise? – do you keep adding more pages or do you maybe have one page per product and link to additional posts in the same category? We don’t want to be too keyword heavy anywhere right?
Thanks!
Phil M.

A lot of the keywords are coming naturally just with in-depth writing. I.e. on one article I might write 500 words but on another 1500. I basically write until I have exhausted all there is to say about that particular subject.

This is something I think most people fall short on, because the typical mindset is “How much crap do I have to write on this subject?”

Whereas I enter it saying “How much information can I give my potential buyer, to help them with exactly what they are looking for.”

Because as we all know when someone is more informed about a product, they are more likely to buy. If a review covers all of the pros and cons and even has some information that maybe people weren’t aware of it grows their knowledge of the subject.

Think about this. If you were going to buy a TV and someone weighed all of the pros and cons for you, plus it included all of the information you were searching for, would you be more likely to buy?

Other phrases were planned. i.e. if my keywords were “Silver Spoons” I might add certain phrases that I found people were searching for like… “good silver spoons”, “cheap silver spoons”, etc…

Obviously, do it without making it look planned or stuffed with keywords.

This is a very inspiring and detailed blog post. I came across your site following a link in email from Jonathan Leger. I have to say you have got incredibly detailed and excellent posts on your blog on almost all the important topics for building and growing a niche site from scratch.

Even though I was about to get up from my laptop and wanted to just quickly scan through your blog posts as Jon linked to it, I have finished reading in detail this post and plan to read at least 2 more which you have linked from this post – the ones about 40 day link building plan and the other about keyword research.

You probably are going to see more of me on your blog as I am going to bookmark you now.